Gamescom 2014: Is The Tomorrow Children Sony's Most Unusual Exclusive?

“I suppose it’s kind of a surreal Marxism simulator,” says Dylan Cuthbert, founder of Q-Games, when I unfairly ask him to describe his ambitious next game, The Tomorrow Children.

It was definitely one of the more cryptic things to come out of Gamescom last week – that's by no means a bad thing – and it’s unfair of me because it’s one of those projects that can’t be adequately distilled into a 60-second trailer. The pitch is too weird, the ambition too great.

Another PS4 exclusive, it’s an experience that gives the player absolute freedom. You can defend a small town from total annihilation from nightmare creatures, or you can spend hours by yourself building elaborate tunnel systems. It’s entirely up to you.

I spoke with Cuthbert to find out more about his latest project, and come to grips with its weird systems and offbeat approach.

“At the base level, I suppose it’s what you want in a game,” says Cuthbert. “It’s a sandbox. You can be all gung-ho, so you can be fighting all the time in the game if you want to. Or you can be quietly adventuring into the islands, finding treasure and exploring and digging out tunnels, helping other players. It really is up to you what you make of it.”

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I suppose it’s what you want in a game. It’s a sandbox."

That all sounds a little overwhelming, but it starts to come into focus when you learn more about the backstory of this curious little world. The game has a very striking aesthetic. Yes, it might be set after an apocalypse, but instead of being seeped in brown and grey tones, buried beneath dirt and ash, this landscape is pristine white. It’s a sterile desert that stretches in every direction.

This particular apocalypse occurred in the 1960s, when a group of Soviet scientists attempted to combine all of human consciousness into one, but it went terribly wrong; it also combined all of humanity physically, melting them into the substance that now engulfs the planet’s surface, known simply as the ‘Void’. This white material is the sum of all of human consciousness. Intrigued?

The cleanest apocalypse we've ever seen.

You enter the world around 100 years after the disaster. The few remaining scientists have created you, one in a fleet of clones, to go out into the hazardous Void and save more humans (collected in the form of Russian Dolls) and rebuild society. And since this timeline diverged in the 1960s, that means rebuilding it upon those Marxist ideals.

The Russian influence lends the game atmosphere, for sure, but also justifies many of its underlying systems. There’s the Ministry of Labour, which rewards you with funds based on your daily actions (the game’s day cycle is still being finalised, but will probably fall between 15-20 minutes) and also a Black Market, where you can purchase special items.

“When you have a regular pickaxe [digging] takes time; if you buy it on the Black Market it’ll be an instant thing. You can just break through. It’s an entire part of the game system. It’s from a world where there is a black market, a place where you can get better items.

“You can run around in the game you find faux American dollars – they’ve got a weird, surreal, distorted future name. You find those lying around and you can use those on the Black Market to buy stuff.”

The Black Market is the place to find upgrades.

And there’s no traditional endgame, and one of the few clear objects – to restore humanity by collecting these Russian dolls – is ambiguous at best. As the population increases, the more work you have to do. Humans are demanding creatures, after all; they need to be fed and kept warm. They will soon become a burden, and instead of being a servant, you become a slave.

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Alternatively, you can deny the collective and assert your own individualism."

It’s an interesting philosophical dimension, and it’s not the only one. While there will be some form of character customisation, you play as a clone, and a big part of the game involves submitting to the collective and engaging in very insect-like activities, like mining or combat. Watching the game being played, I could see dozens of players cooperating, chipping away at a rock formation that had sprung from the Void. But alternatively, you can deny the collective and assert your own individualism. I asked Cuthbert about this very tension, and what side the game supports.

“I think it’s a balance. It’s very difficult for a lot of people to play a multiplayer game. They’ll be put off. A lot of people don’t want to play Call of Duty online. When you’re working with the other players, you feel a nice sense of group, I suppose. It’s just really enjoyable, I think, to be involved in that.

“At the same time, you can be by yourself for a little while and explore, look around, take in the scenery or just find treasure and take out monsters yourself. Every single thing you do – even while alone – is part of the log system. When you go back to the labour office, you get paid for every little thing you’ve been doing even if you’ve been digging holes in the middle of nowhere you’ll get paid for it.

“That’s part of your own personal loop – you don’t need other players to do that.”

Stand and fight?

So you can do whatever you want. There’s no traditional endgame. You can build to your heart’s content or specialise in taking down monsters. Incidentally, the monsters are intriguing in their own right, emerging from the psychic ooze that surrounds the town.

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They come from the nightmares of mankind, from the shared consciousness."

“They come from the nightmares of mankind, from the shared consciousness,” Cuthbert tells me. And in the demonstration I saw, there were two creatures hellbent on destruction – one resembled Godzilla, while the other was a giant mechanical spider. Both appeared to be made from chrome. Once defeated, these creatures can be mined for valuable resources. Again, it’s all entirely optional.

It’s best to think of The Tomorrow Children as a social game (that’s how it was repeatedly described) but one that also allows you to be anti-social. You can be a servant and end up a slave, or you can be an explorer of a new world. There’s both a sense of community and solitude to be found in its inter-connected, always-on world. It'll grow over time and there'll be a companion app that'll let you monitor your clone wherever you are.

Building a staircase to nowhere.

I finish by asking Cuthbert what he most enjoys doing in the world he’s created. He tells me his likes to head for the horizon, for the distant islands slowly rising from the good of humanity’s shared consciousness and dig. He likes to build tunnels in this stone, elaborate staircases that stretch to the very top, and from time to time he hears the sirens back in the town, as the latest wave of monsters try to destroy what everyone is building, but he stays put, unconcerned, and continues to build. “I sometimes think ‘Should I go back?’ Nah, I’ll just carry on here. It’s great in that sense. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”